Religious Education in the Family

by Henry Frederick Cope

Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught, while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says. The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.

There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality. The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the persons away you remove all educational potencies.

The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people. Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives. Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational agency, from its religious reality.

§ 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES

All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers, save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and, besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of fathers.

There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood wholly in physiological terms, imagining—if they think about it at all—that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only they know how to bear, feed, and clothe children properly. True, such duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good provider" who provides only things for his family, no matter with what generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves first of all.

He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best business in the world, the development of children's characters.

Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them those social advantages which he missed in youth.

But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality. It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home is left headless and soon heartless. If we at all desire the fruits of character in the home we must give ourselves personally.

It is not alone the habitué of the saloon or the idler in clubs and fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of being worse than an infidel. A father belongs to his home more than he belongs to his church. There have been men, though probably their number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.